CaBot: Designing and Evaluating an Autonomous Navigation Robot for Blind People

Guerreiro, João; Sato, Daisuke; Asakawa, Saki; Dong, Huixu; Kitani, Kris M.; Asakawa, Chieko

doi:10.1145/3308561.3353771

Cited by 108 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Several of the experiments only provided qualitative assessments of how the grounded kinesthetic feedback affected participants' navigation (31,45,46). One study reported that participants required minimal training with their device to walk at faster speeds than previous studies of white cane users (32), supporting the idea that grounded kinesthetic feedback is intuitive. However, these four devices may be challenging to extend to everyday use because they are designed only for indoor use, cost up to $6000 USD, and weigh 6 to 25 kg, whereas the Augmented Cane costs $400 USD and weighs 1.2 kg (table S1).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multimodal sensing and intuitive steering assistance improve navigation and mobility for people with impaired vision

2021

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Globally, more than 250 million people have impaired vision and face challenges navigating outside their homes, affecting their independence, mental health, and physical health. Navigating unfamiliar routes is challenging for people with impaired vision because it may require avoiding obstacles, recognizing objects, and wayfinding indoors and outdoors. Existing approaches such as white canes, guide dogs, and electronic travel aids only tackle some of these challenges. Here, we present the Augmented Cane, a white cane with a comprehensive set of sensors and an intuitive feedback method to steer the user, which addresses navigation challenges and improves mobility for people with impaired vision. We compared the Augmented Cane with a white cane by having sighted and visually impaired participants complete navigation challenges while blindfolded: walking along hallways, avoiding obstacles, and following outdoor waypoints. Across all experiments, the Augmented Cane increased the walking speed for participants with impaired vision by 18 ± 7% and sighted participants by 35 ± 12% compared with a white cane. The increase in walking speed may be due to accurate steering assistance, reduced cognitive load, fewer contacts with the environment, and higher participant confidence. We also demonstrate advanced navigation capabilities of the Augmented Cane: indoor wayfinding, recognizing and steering the participant to a key object, and navigating a sequence of indoor and outdoor challenges. The open-source and low-cost design of the Augmented Cane provides a platform that may improve the mobility and quality of life of people with impaired vision.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multimodal sensing and intuitive steering assistance improve navigation and mobility for people with impaired vision

2021

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“…In the case when various sensors are used to analyze a similar obstacle, they can confirm the obtained information and improve the estimation precision of each other. Kumar [15] has proposed a robotic navigation system including two controllers. The first one is intended to compute the path from the current position to a target point without considering potential obstacles.…”

Section: Roboticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

SRAVIP: Smart Robot Assistant for Visually Impaired Persons

Albogamy¹,

Alotaibi²,

Alhawdan³

et al. 2021

IJACSA

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Vision is one of the most important human senses, as visually impaired people encounter various difficulties due to their inability to move safely in different environments. This research aimed to facilitate integrating such persons into society by proposing a robotic solution (Robot Assistance) to assist them in navigating within indoor environments, such as schools, universities, hospitals, airports, etc. according to a prescheduled task. The proposed system is called the smart robot assistant for visually impaired persons (SRAVIP). It includes two subsystems: 1) an initialization system aimed to initialize the robot, create an environment map, and register a visual impaired person as a target object; 2) a real-time operation system implemented to navigate the mobile robot and communicate with the target object using a speech-processing engine and an optical character recognition (OCR) module. An important contribution of the proposed SRAVIP is the user-independent, i.e. it does not depend on the user, and one robot can serve unlimited users. SRAVIP utilized Turtlebot3 robot to realize SRAVIP and then tested it in the College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, AlMuzahmiyah Campus. The experimental results confirmed that the proposed system could function successfully.

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“…In addition, there are great advances in miniaturized sensors capable of providing parameters of moving objects, such as position and velocity [15][16][17]. The fusion of the advances in both sensors and artificial intelligence has led to many projects that seek to support VIP in navigation [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27], traveling [28][29][30][31], representation of the real world [32][33][34][35], obstacle detection on wayfinding [29,[36][37][38], assistant robots [39,40], and other applications…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition, there are great advances in miniaturized sensors capable of providing parameters of moving objects, such as position and velocity [ 15 , 16 , 17 ]. The fusion of the advances in both sensors and artificial intelligence has led to many projects that seek to support VIP in navigation [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 ], traveling [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ], representation of the real world [ 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ], obstacle detection on wayfinding [ 29 , 36 , 37 , 38 ], assistant robots [ 39 , 40 ], and other applications for general mobility, for monitoring and improving PA, and for sports participation of the VIP [ 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 ]. The application spectrum is extensive and may include even sensor fusion for monitoring the vital signs of guide dogs in training [ 45 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inertial Measurement Unit Sensors in Assistive Technologies for Visually Impaired People, a Review

Leiva

Jaén-Vargas

Codina

et al. 2021

Sensors

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A diverse array of assistive technologies have been developed to help Visually Impaired People (VIP) face many basic daily autonomy challenges. Inertial measurement unit sensors, on the other hand, have been used for navigation, guidance, and localization but especially for full body motion tracking due to their low cost and miniaturization, which have allowed the estimation of kinematic parameters and biomechanical analysis for different field of applications. The aim of this work was to present a comprehensive approach of assistive technologies for VIP that include inertial sensors as input, producing results on the comprehension of technical characteristics of the inertial sensors, the methodologies applied, and their specific role in each developed system. The results show that there are just a few inertial sensor-based systems. However, these sensors provide essential information when combined with optical sensors and radio signals for navigation and special application fields. The discussion includes new avenues of research, missing elements, and usability analysis, since a limitation evidenced in the selected articles is the lack of user-centered designs. Finally, regarding application fields, it has been highlighted that a gap exists in the literature regarding aids for rehabilitation and biomechanical analysis of VIP. Most of the findings are focused on navigation and obstacle detection, and this should be considered for future applications.

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CaBot: Designing and Evaluating an Autonomous Navigation Robot for Blind People

Cited by 108 publications

References 56 publications

Multimodal sensing and intuitive steering assistance improve navigation and mobility for people with impaired vision

Multimodal sensing and intuitive steering assistance improve navigation and mobility for people with impaired vision

SRAVIP: Smart Robot Assistant for Visually Impaired Persons

Inertial Measurement Unit Sensors in Assistive Technologies for Visually Impaired People, a Review

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